During the early eighties the "First-Class Man of Balliol College" reappeared with a translation of Herodotus book by book. From this time until the outbreak of the present war there was a steady output of these utilitarian translations. G. F. H. Sykes, J. H. Haydon, A. H. Allcroft, J. A. Prout, F. G. Plaistowe, E. S. Crooke, J. Thompson, B. J. Hayes, H. Hailstone, T. R. Mills, W. H. Balgarnie, J. F. Stout, and others who did only one or two books, made their translations with the student of the language as their reading public. Some of these translations appeared in the _University Tutorial Series_, a collection of books in which the text, translations, notes, vocabulary, difficult parsings, and test papers were published.
The work of these men, quantitatively at least, is an important factor in the history of Greek translation. Between 1850 and 1870 only eleven translations of this type were published; between the years 1870 and 1910, however, at least two hundred and eleven schoolboy helps were published. The following table gives the minimum figures for this kind of translation during these years.
1870-1879=26 1880-1889=62 1890-1899=86 1900-1909=37
The falling off in the first decade of the twentieth century may be due to two causes: first, the decrease in the number of students of Greek in the schools, which was the result of the great opposition stirred up in the latter part of the nineteenth century by the advocates of a more practical education; and, secondly, the ample production of the decade preceding filled the market and plentifully supplied the demand. I have set forth here these figures in regard to the schoolboy translation because I doubt whether the extent of that type of work has been realized by any except the competing publishers. To no small degree has the total of translations in the latter part of the nineteenth century been increased by this type of publication.
In the preceding paragraphs I have tried to suggest the reasons for the changing fortunes of English translation from the Greek. The quantity of translations produced between 1484 and 1917 is somewhat larger than is generally realized: the total number of translations is 2164, of which 1289 are original translations and 875 are reprintings. For those who wish to see the progress numerically decade by decade I give the following table upon which the chart at the opening of this section was based.